Latent State Estimation Helps UI Agents to Reason

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bishop, William E, Li, Alice, Rawles, Christopher, Riva, Oriana
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914801832165376
author Bishop, William E
Li, Alice
Rawles, Christopher
Riva, Oriana
author_facet Bishop, William E
Li, Alice
Rawles, Christopher
Riva, Oriana
contents A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a task latent. Despite recent impressive demonstrations of LLM's reasoning abilities on various benchmarks, whether LLMs can build estimates of latent state and leverage them for reasoning has not been explicitly studied. We investigate this problem in the real-world domain of autonomous UI agents. We establish that appropriately prompting LLMs in a zero-shot manner can be formally understood as forming point estimates of latent state in a textual space. In the context of autonomous UI agents we then show that LLMs used in this manner are more than $76\%$ accurate at inferring various aspects of latent state, such as performed (vs. commanded) actions and task progression. Using both public and internal benchmarks and three reasoning methods (zero-shot, CoT-SC & ReAct), we show that LLM-powered agents that explicitly estimate and reason about latent state are able to successfully complete up to 1.6x more tasks than those that do not.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_11120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent State Estimation Helps UI Agents to Reason
Bishop, William E
Li, Alice
Rawles, Christopher
Riva, Oriana
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a task latent. Despite recent impressive demonstrations of LLM's reasoning abilities on various benchmarks, whether LLMs can build estimates of latent state and leverage them for reasoning has not been explicitly studied. We investigate this problem in the real-world domain of autonomous UI agents. We establish that appropriately prompting LLMs in a zero-shot manner can be formally understood as forming point estimates of latent state in a textual space. In the context of autonomous UI agents we then show that LLMs used in this manner are more than $76\%$ accurate at inferring various aspects of latent state, such as performed (vs. commanded) actions and task progression. Using both public and internal benchmarks and three reasoning methods (zero-shot, CoT-SC & ReAct), we show that LLM-powered agents that explicitly estimate and reason about latent state are able to successfully complete up to 1.6x more tasks than those that do not.
title Latent State Estimation Helps UI Agents to Reason
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11120